This is just bullshit.

Each department has room in their budget for a Christmas luncheon.

The department I'm in now has a lot of people on "loan" from this other department, and last week, they got a fancy Christmas lunch.

We got nothing.

Instead, a couple of girls in my department decided, "Wouldn't it be fun to have a potluck?"

Um, no.

I don't want to come home from work and slave in front of the kitchen stove to cook something besides my own dinner and then lug a huge casserole dish to work and then lug it all the way back.

"Yeah, but wouldn't it be fun to try other types of cuisine?" someone asked.

Listen here: if I wanted to try other types of cuisine, I'd go to a fucking restaurant, okay? Some people that we work with are just downright nasty and have really questionable hygiene issues. I don't want to be eating their food.

But the main issue here is: you have room in the budget for this one small thing, but you decide not to use that money; instead, you're going to come in under budget and that money's gonna go into some big wig's bonus.

It's friggin' unreal.

There's more, though: for those of us who didn't get to go to this fancy luncheon, we were included in this mass email that had all these pictures from the lunch.

It was like, "Ha ha. Look at all the fun we had. Guess it sucks to be you!"

I don't get it.

I always wind up in shit companies!

Here's the other thing: they hired this company to develop new software for us. This company basically lied and said, "No problem. We can do that."

Instead, several months later, we get a shitty, faulty product that doesn't make life easier; it makes life so much more difficult that they actually need to hire all these people just to fix all the mistakes generated by this new software.

Okay, so what would a rational CEO do?

I'll tell you what I would have done: I would have fired them on the spot, sued them and got my money back and hired somebody else to do the job right.

But no.

This company opted to just work around this problem.

It's like this: you decide to install a security alarm in your house. The alarm company doesn't do the job right and now you've got a state-of-the-art system that goes off at will and doesn't do jack shit to prevent people from breaking into your house.

But instead of saying, "Either fix this or I'm going to sue your fucking ass", you decide to say, "You know what? It's okay. I'll just live with the noise and sit by the front door for the rest of my life to make sure nobody breaks in."

At our annual meeting, I got the overriding sense that this company always aims for "middle of the pack."

Forget excellence! Forget about investing in our employees! Forget about trying to be better! Let's just aim for the middle of the road, because we're underachievers, goddamnit!

I swear to God, when I got that stupid email with the pictures, I just wanted to send a snotty email back to the Senior VP's office and say, "Thanks for the kick in the teeth!"

Bloody assholes.

I initially thought about refusing to go because I disagreed with the whole principle of the thing.

(And yes, I've become increasingly Scrooge/Grinch-like in my old age.)

But a couple of people kept telling me I was just going to look uncooperative and not much of a team player and that this would come back to bite me in the ass.

Will report back tomorrow about how this bullshit pot luck went.